Poetry hasn’t ruined my life. But How Poetry Ruined My Life is the title of a book I never wrote. I sketched out a short proposal for it almost exactly ten years ago, in middle of the one period of severe depression I’ve known in my adult life. This lasted for about three months, until I came out of it thanks to the support of family, friends, therapy and anti-depressants. In the middle of it, I felt awful: I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think straight, I thought everything was about to end — on bright sunny days — in catastrophe. I felt I understood the inside of the phrase “nervous breakdown”.
It had various causes, the most obvious being the death of my Dad the year before, and the death of my Mum seven years before that, while I was a PhD student. But the cause I focused on — perhaps because it was rather less complicated than the loss of both my parents — was my forthcoming book, The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry.
By the time it went to press, I hated that book — or, rather, I hated myself for having produced it. For anyone who hasn’t dipped in recently, it’s a 700-page biographical dictionary of Anglophone poets, living and dead. I certainly didn’t write all of it. But in 2011, I signed a contract with Oxford University Press, undertaking
to prepare a new edition of The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English by adding 50,000 new words, which includes updates and revisions of existing entries and new entries. Changes will seek to redress the current UK-bias in the text and will include entries on poets from English-speaking territories and poets who have gained prominence since […] the last edition
Was this a good idea? The first edition, published in 1994, was edited by the poet Ian Hamilton, with the help of a “day-to-day” assistant. Hamilton, a famously acerbic critic, didn’t write any entries himself though: he contracted a long and starry list of contributors, even managing to get an entry on Robert Lowell from Seamus Heaney. Those were the pre-internet days when a reference work carried weight.
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